Responses to German Unification

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It has now been more than a half-decade since the destruction
of the Berlin wall, the collapse of Communist rule in East Germany, and
the unification of the German state. These are, no doubt, seismic shifts,
but the question remains: how deep does unification run? Has the construction
of one state out of two created, at the same time, one people? What has
become of the social networks, habits of thought and action, and sense of
history that developed over four decades in the vanished German Democratic
Republic? Are the terms 'East' and 'West' now merely geographical expressions,
or, do they continue to signify a stark divide, in terms of economic and
social conditions, political perspectives, ways of life, and outlooks on
the past and future?

These were the questions addressed by a symposium held on
October 27, organized by the Goethe Institute of Ann Arbor and cosponsored
by the Center for European Studies (CES) and the Department of Germanic
Languages and Literatures. The symposium,
Responses to German Unification,
featured Wolfgang Engler, a cultural sociologist and philosopher, who
teaches at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst in Berlin and is contributing
editor to the weekly,
Die Zeit, and Joyce Mushaben, professor of
political science and women's studies at the University of Missouri-St.
Louis, and author of books and articles on political and social transformation
in East and West Germany after 1945. Kathleen Canning moderated the symposium,
and Geoff Eley (History) commented on the papers by Engler and Mushaben.

Addressing the "Issues that Still Divide East and West
Germans," Wolfgang Engler contended that only a small percentage
of both East and West Germans currently view themselves as sharing a common
identity. Although the economic divide between East and West Germany has
become less blatant since monetary union in 1990, Engler argued that persistent
alienation and prejudice have widened the gulf between East and West in
the course of reunification. While, in Engler's view, few East Germans
long to rebuild the Berlin wall or re-establish socialism, the experiences
of social inequality, chronic unemployment and many short- sighted political
decisions, have led to a sharp shift in public opinion since 1990: while
80 percent of East Germans accepted the "institutional framework
of the Federal Republic" in 1990, only 40 percent do so today. Eighty
percent of East Germans welcomed the "social-market economy"
in 1990, while only one-third do so today. Over the same period, support
for the "project of Communism" has grown from 7 to 24 percent,
as recent polls indicate.

Engler traced the transformation of the hopeful revolution
of 1989 into a mere "training program for the East Germans,"
in which they were to overcome their faulty socialization, to change mentalities
and habits by unlearning "what they already knew how to do,"
and to erase East German history, which had become an impediment to becoming
"proper Germans without delay." In Engler's view, however, West
German politicians and policy-makers have misunderstood the complex relationship
between state and society in East Germany. In the interstices of a framework
of state interference and intimidation, East German citizens had room
to strategize, negotiate and manage risk creatively. Moreover, Engler
emphasized, the hardened vision in the West of "communist socialization
of the individual" made it impossible for West Germans to understand
that East Germans had removed "the system within from their minds
and habits long before it collapsed." As people "negotiated
everyday life as well as professional life mostly by themselves"
during the 1970s and 1980s, they laid claim to significant social power
as citizens, which was lost when the wall was dismantled in 1989. West
Germans, Engler maintained, have not only failed to understand what East
Germans lost in the process of reunification, but also to recognize that
many of the skills East Germans acquired as "trained risk managers"
and negotiators might have been tapped in welding the two societies together.

In her paper, "Social Capital, Civic Nationalism and
Democratic Identity in the New German States," Joyce Mushaben explained
that in the process of merging the two states, West German culture has
come to represent "an unalterable mainstream," while East German
culture has become "nothing more than a marginal force, to be intentionally
subjected to eventual extinction...." Mushaben largely agreed with
Engler that East Germans created a "kind of underground civil society,"
based on dense layers of social networks (from church groups to theater-brigades
and children's play groups), and which, in fact, had a significant part
in making the transformation of 1989 possible.

Mushaben also underscored the importance of gender in analyzing
the social effects of reunification in the East. Given the importance
of social networks at work-places to social identities in East Germany,
the mass unemployment among women in the new German states has "tremendous
implications for women's ability to engage in basic political communication
and to discover/solidify new forms of social capital through familiar
channels." Similarly, the "increasing mobility forced upon East
Germans by the disappearance of jobs in their hometowns has thoroughly
disrupted... the social relations that cumulatively made up a community's
social capital." Few of those who have begun to "master life
in a 'foreign culture'" — either by moving to the West or by working
for western businesses — have the time or energy "to share their
learning experiences with the people left behind," most of whom are
women with dependent children or people over 55. The process of "social
learning," a vital component of reunification, has thus taken place
on an individual rather than a collective basis and is unlikely, in Mushaben's
view, "to foster a new collective identity" desired by politicians
in the West.

At odds, in fact, with an envisioned collective German identity
is the recent rediscovery of East German "otherness," which
is often mockingly referred to as "Ostalgie." While usually
viewed by West Germans as an attempt to rewrite the history of the German
Democratic Republic [GDR] as a golden age, the resurgence of a particular
East German social identity is, in Mushaben's view, a vital part of the
task of reassembling and reconfiguring pieces of "the old life"
into new social networks that will replace those that have been lost in
the process of reunification. Indeed, Mushaben suggests that recovering
those networks and rebuilding social capital are essential prerequisites
for the emergence of a democratic civic culture in the new German states.

In his closing commentary, Geoff Eley underscored the failures
of integration of the two states, encompassing the dismantling of the
East German economy and welfare state; demographic upheaval; new gender
relations; unemployment; "the carpetbagging of westerners";
and, more broadly, "the destructive and disqualifying effects on
the moral integrity, the habitus and the simple workability of masses
of existing lives." A crucial question will be how the Federal Republic
will contend with the long-term problems of regional backwardness that
follow from the structural underdevelopment of the new German state. West
German policy, Eley argued, will have an important role in determining
"how the East's social capital can begin to be composed."

Finally, Eley explored the implications of German reunification
for the narratives of German history. The disqualification of the history
of the GDR "into an aberration of German historical development,
with no pre- history before the Soviet occupation, and no consequences
for the future, beyond the wreckage of the past that needs to be cleaned
up," has led to the excision of forty years of history "from
the surrounding contexts of the German past and the German present."
In particular, Eley stressed, the disavowal of East Germany in the narratives
of German history has made possible the conflation of the GDR with the
Third Reich as "variant forms of dictatorship."

All three speakers concurred that confronting and revising
the history of East Germany is a vital prerequisite to forging a collective
national identity embedded in democratic civic culture. Rewriting East
Germany into the narratives of German history, recasting East German social
identities to encompass the creative improvising, negotiating, and risk-managing
that was required by the Communist system; rebuilding social networks
amidst the landscape of dismantled factories, deserted downtowns, and
abandoned daycare centers, will certainly spur on this process in the
new German states. And what of the West? All three speakers implied that
revision cannot remain the task of the East Germans alone. As Eley suggested,
the "established complacencies of West German identity," thus
far "massively confirmed" by the process of reunification, may
have to be destabilized, the silences and suppressions of the autonomies
and separate histories of East German development confronted, if the people
in East Germany are to become a "genuine partner in the process of
unification."

Kathleen Canning is a faculty member in History
and Women's Studies, and director of the Center for European Studies.